Composition - why tonal values and contrast are important

A walk on the Downs - a work in progress coloured pencil on Arches HP, 10" x 8" copyright images and text by Katherine Tyrrell

"Tonal values are critical. The lights and darks contribute more to the success of a painting's composition than any other factor, including color. In fact your painting will really only be as good as the tonal values" Greg Albert, The Simple Secret to Better Panting

Time and time again when entering a gallery, the painting which stands out from the crowd is the one which has a strong design and value pattern. Exactly the same thing happens when you sit viewing slides entered for a competition. Or if you visit an artist's website or shop/auction site and view thumbnail images in an online gallery. What you see initially is the abstracted pattern . Everything else - including all the detail - is subordinate in terms of impact. What gets really interesting is that when you have learned how to extract values from the morass of colour and complexity of shapes that you see everyday, then you start to see the world in design terms and paintable pictures. It's actually very entertaining - if a tad distracting when you're driving! What is value?

Value - An element of art that refers to luminance or luminosity — the lightness or darkness of a color. This is important in any polychromatic image, but it can be more apparent when an image is monochromatic, as in many drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and photographs. This is commonly the case in much sculpture and architecture too. ArtLex

What is a value scale? A value scale is a way of describing how values change between black and white. You can construct a value scale in any number of ways - and people have. One of the most well known is the Denman Ross nine step value scale. This was devised in 1907. You can see that one of the terms he uses to describe the different values is ' higlight' - which is one which artists use all the time. Some artists recommend locating your darkest dark and lightest light prior to starting a painting. If you use the right value, the colour will tend to read true to the value pattern of your subject no matter what it is. What are value intervals? A value interval is the space inbetween a change in value. The above chart has regular (ie equal) value intervals. Greg Albert and others recommend having unequal value intervals in a painting. This means not all areas relating to a particular value are same shape or size as that relating to other values. A good way of remembering this is Greg Albert's 'mostly, some and a bit' formula which is explained in his book. What is a value pattern? Cosmo (my Somali cat) kindly obliged by posing and can be seen here modelling an example of a value pattern! ;) Note this pattern has three values in shapes which are an unequal size. The value pattern:

• enables you to see that this is a furry cat even though you only have shape definition and values to use in identifying what you are looking at.
• Colours could be changed - but so long as the values remained the same you'd know it was a cat.
• This value pattern has a:
• dominant value - dark chocolate colour
• middle value - milk chocolate colour
• least dominant value - pale peach colour.

What helps to make value patterns work? Value is a critical element in the design of a painting. Value also needs to be related and integrated with the other elements and principles of design and composition. Here are some ways in which you can design value patterns which make a painting attractive and/or interesting to the eye:

• SQUINT!
• Lesson #1 for those trying to see values is that if you squint you will see value patterns - although squinting tends to reveal the pattern rather than the true value. It enables you to lose all the detail and to some extent the colour leaving just the values. So squint when you're looking for a strong design (in a landscape/still life/portrait) and squint when you're assessing whether your work has a strong value pattern.
• Lesson #2 only applies to those of us who wear glasses. Take your glasses off and look again at your subject or painting. You'll lose the detail so it isn't competing for your attention and will have a simpler view of subject or painting.
• focus on the big shapes and the abstract pattern of flat values. Start by identifying three, four or five shapes of different size and unequal weight (in the light/dark sense). Simple works best. Unequal numbers can work better than even. Start big and simple, work towards smaller shapes and more detail. If you start with detail you'll often lose the value pattern.
• let what interested you inform decisions about the weight and balance of values. The abstract pattern can be interesting in itself - but the reasons behind why selected a specific subject can often be different. Integrating the two helps to make a painting work better.
• Value creates mood and contrast creates drama - see this example by Rembrandt
• design or find lighting arrangements which make the value pattern more interesting. You don't have to work with what presents at face value. You can:
• choose to work plein air at different times of the day.
• set up lighting arrangements to work indoors and from life. (see How to create a lightbox)
• move your subject around to find the light which gives the most attractive composition.
• Rembrandt lighting is often used in portraiture
• organise transitions in value according to how light behaves
• Art Studio Chalk board has a good demonstration of how this works for spheres.
• use a monochromatic thumbnail sketch to identify alternative ways of using values in relation to the big shapes. You can change or switch values around - if the background is light try making it dark.

An example - plein air sketching As anybody who has sketched plein air will know, the clouds move and the light changes! The trick in creating a sketch which works well is to wait until the light works or to plan to be in place when you have a good chance of experiencing light which helps with value patterns design. One approach is to work early in the morning or late in the day when the sun is low and produces interesting shadows. In the middle of the day, one often needs to wait a while and observe how the light moves in order to see what might work well. Making a quick thumbnail sketch of what attracted you to the way the light falls helps enormously with completing a painting. You can also make quick thumbnails of how the light changes while painting. It maybe be that you'll see something better as the day progresses.

• try introducing a strong value contrast. This works especially well in identifying a focus point.
• Chiaroscuro (Italian for clear-dark) is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark.

• use one dominant value. Assessments will need to be made about the relative balance with other values.
• weight values to one end or the other of the value range
• if very light values dominate then the painting is referred to as 'high key' - a few low key marks will draw the eye

Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862 James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) Oil on canvas; 83 7/8 x 42 1/2 in. (213 x 107.9 cm) Salon des Refusés, 1863 National Gallery of Art, Washington, Harris Whittemore Collection 1943.6.2

• dominance by very dark values creates a 'low key' painting - high key marks immediately draw the eye

Venetian Interior, c. 1880-82 John Singer Sargent, (American, 1856-1925) oil on canvas, 26 7/8 X 34 3/16 in. (63.3 X 86.8 cm) Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

• always consider the background value behind a subject.
• People sometimes start a painting with the subject matter which interests them - and then wonder what to do about the background. This is a 'bad habit' which tends to be very common among artists who are starting out and/or have little formal training and/or skipped some of the chapters in the art instruction book. It's important to know why it's a bad habit and why it actively works against a painting being made as effective as possible
• Background have values as well as shapes and colours. If you subscribe to the notion that to hava painting with impact you have to design a painting, then the background MUST be considered as part of the overall equation - of the balance of values, shapes, colours etc - from the very beginning. Its value (and shape and colour) will affect everything else in the painting. Adding a background in at the end and designing it to work well is an incredibly difficutlt thing to do which even experienced artists struggle with.
• know and understand the values produced by your materials. It's especially helpful to know what is the value of your different paints/pastels/pencils.
• if your paint dries lighter (eg as frequently happens in watercolour) then you need to know what value it will create
• Very often pastel artists will sort their tray of pastels out into a value based arrangement. Thus value dominates the arrangements and then colour.
• Try inspecting how experienced artists lay out their palettes - you'll often notice that it has a value bias.

Here are some websites and/or blog posts by people who have emphasised the importance of value to composition.

• ArtLex: Value - includes a discussion about luminosity
• Handprint has a wealth of information about values including:
• the dominance of value
• the value scale
• hue, lightness and saturation
• the artist's value wheel
• grayscales & gamut mapping
• painting values
• Studio Chalkboard: Grayscale and Planar Values
• John Carlson wrote an influential book Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting. Chapter 4 'Design' concerns itself with a pattern of differenting values. The link is to an online version of parts of the book. (I can hear Robyn planning reading time!)
• Handprint (Handprint) devotes part of his site to value - and has some interesting demonstrations of its importance to design
• Ed Terpening (Life Plein Air) made some observations on painting on his blog in 2007:
• Observation 2 - work in abstractions. It contains a number of tips for working with value and abstractions.
• Observation 7 - value
• Linda Blondheim (Landscapes of the South)
• has been studying Notan and using it in her paintings
• and has some tips about using Notan to find values

Composition: tools to help find and assess value and tone This section repeats part of Composition and Design - finding and creating a focal point (24 January 2008) and is repeated here for the sake of completeness and this post being read out of sequence.

• the Val-U-Viewer value finder. An instant hit with all the artists when introduced to it by sally Strand. You can read about by clicking the first link. You can also see one on my website. Red acetate is really very useful!
• Thumbnails:
• thumbnail sketches in 3 values (or 5 values) - see Composition and Design - Resources for Artists for tips on how to do this as the blog post about how to do this comes later!
• reducing a digital image of your work down to a thumbnail size often provides a check of whether the value pattern is registering. This will also be covered in the post which follows.
• Notan:
• Use the Notan approach advocated by Arthur Wesley Dow to focus on values and the impact of positive and negative shapes with different values. Notan tends to empphasise the use of two or three values only

• You can learn a little more and also see how I worked with value studies last year in Learning about Notan #1, #2 and #3.
• You can read more about it in Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers.
• Greyscale:
• enables you to see the value pattern in monochromatic form (black, gres, white). This helps people who have difficulty in seeing values because they get distracted by colour. It also helps you to learn about the values of different colours.
• Composition - using PS Elements to help with design provides a brief overview of how to use greyscale in PS Elements
• Read about greyscale on Wikipedia

• Working with Values:
• Adobe Photoshop Elements enables you to reduce a reference photo (or a scan of your work so far) to up to 8 values using the cutout tool. This is what I've been using for my notan work - and the blog post on that will follow very soon! I've been using it since version 3 and I'm now on version 5! For a basic description of how to use it see Composition - using PS Elements to help with design
• Artellmedia provide a software programme called Artworks Basic - which seeks to aid composition and provides scope to determine what a digital picture looks like in different numbers of values. It have a sophisticated way of showing you where the different values are. Only listed as being suitable for computers up to XP and I've not yet tried to load it on my new Vista Laptop yet - but the originators don't think it'll be a problem.

Links: Making a Mark Composition Project - see below for earlier posts relating to this project

• Composition and Design - Resources for Artists
• Composition and Design - An Introduction
• Composition - The Elements of Design
• Composition - Principles of Design
• Greg Albert - The Simple Secret to Better Painting
• Composition and Design - A Digest #1
• Composition and Design - finding and creating a focal point
• Composition - the four most important lines
• Composition - thinking in threes
• Composition - using PS Elements to help with design

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